What We're Protecting

​First, We Have to Define What We're Protecting - and Why

There's are few things worse than conflict--and conflict with a neighbor and with city government are special types of hell. Normal people want peace; they want their homes and neighborhoods to be their little slice of paradise. They want to like and respect their neighbors. They want a good relationship with their city government.

Unfortunately, there will come a time in all our lives when we have to stand up for something we want to protect.

What is the best course of action to protect neighborhoods and a way of life? Strength in numbers. Strength, focus, and solidarity through community.

We can start by deciding what we want this neighborhood to be in the future; even after we're gone. Andy and I have lived here since our early twenties, we're now in our fifties. We gravitated to this part of town because we loved the quirkiness, the imperfection, the freedom, the diversity, the closeness to the mountains. Here, we found an opportunity to buy a historic home at an affordable price, fix it up, and build a life! Westsiders have a long tradition of devotion to their neighborhoods. About 80% of the people on my block have been here for two decades or more. Some families have been here for generations.

We love our freedom here on the Westside, but now we're seeing that our work over the decades has improved the neighborhood to the point where property values have increased, and continue to increase, dramatically. Expanding tourism makes this historic district even more desirable to developers. The flipside of all that freedom is that the Westside is easy prey for developers. There are a lot of working class families here, and over 90% of us are feeling the pinch financially these days. We all know someone who has experienced misfortune and had to declare bankruptcy or have lost their home! A developer's main incentive is not to buy a home to build a life, or to improve a neighborhood, but to do one thing only: Make MONEY. That's not a judgment, that's just the nature of that kind of business.

I am all for freedom, and in the end it's OUR choice. What do we want? Do we want to build up the Westside in its current free-for-all manner, apparently little-oversight manner, and not worry about the future? Or, do we want to try to protect what we have . . . right now . . . before we see problems with over-development?

(As a note, several people have told me about how this kind of development has had horrible impacts on historic neighborhoods in Denver. Builders and developers rushed in and overbuilt to the point where the city said, "NO MORE, PERIOD." But that's not a problem for the developers; they just pack up and go to the next place, leaving the rest of us to deal with--and pay for--the problems they created. A too-familiar story, isn't it?)

Since Andy and I got into this, it's become clear that we're at a crossroads. We don't want others to go through the rude awakening we've experienced, when a building goes up that encroaches on your quality of life and your property values. Think about it. If everyone on your block built a vacation rental in their backyard, what would your neighborhood be like? There would be increased traffic, increased noise, less parking, more flooding, more stress. Those are facts. Andy and I have thought about this many times over the years. We own two properties side by side. The home we live in is one we bought after fixing up our first house on Kiowa St. in the early 80s. We worked for years on that house, sold it, and bought the home we live in now. Our second property, on a lot right next to it, was a HUD house, purchased for the $9K in the early 90s. It was a mess, too, and we fixed it up slowly, over years, and used it for our businesses. Last year we made it into a vacation rental property as we needed the money to pay to put two daughters through college.

So, we are obviously not against vacation rentals, quite the contrary. We could legally put two more vacation rentals in our backyards. Like almost everyone we know, we could use the extra money! But we've not done that, and we don't want to. Because we do care about preserving this neighborhood. We've been here a while and we realize we have something special here. Something worth protecting. We know that development should be done with consideration of others and for the future.

But that is just us. How the majority of Westsiders feel about this issue will determine everyone's future here.

It's all up to us. So, let's talk!

Go to the Contact Page, send us a note. What does this area mean to you and what are your feelings about "protecting the Westside"?

--Andrew and Sandra Knauf

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